A big part of the problem is that too many people don't get statistics. A particular race might produce more people with particular good or bad characteristic than other races, but the vast majority of that race are just like you and me!

Back in 2006, The Edge annual question to leading scientists was: What is your dangerous idea? As I noted at the time, one of the more interesting contributions was from Steven Pinker - Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments. The year 2005 saw several p...

Writer Shazia Hobbs, who was brought up a Muslim in Glasgow, on veiling and the niqab: Pakistani people, when they first arrived in the UK, were quite relaxed about their religion. There were very few hijabs. Niqabs and burkas were fewer still. Long beards were generally only worn by the most de...

Writer Shazia Hobbs, who was brought up a Muslim in Glasgow, on veiling and the niqab: Pakistani people, when they first arrived in the UK, were quite relaxed about their religion. There were very few hijabs. Niqabs and burkas were fewer still. Long beards were generally only worn by the most de...

Something wrong here. This got published on the Guardian. (No Comments, of course!)
"Morrissey also appeared to suggest that politicians were afraid to refer to Abedi as an Islamist extremist."
“Manchester mayor Andy Burnham says the attack is the work of an ‘extremist’. An extreme what? An extreme rabbit?”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/may/23/morrissey-attacks-politicians-and-the-queen-over-manchester-terrorism-response

Does the reaction to the Manchester bombing show a change from the usual claptrap? Terry Glavin thinks so: At the time of the London bombings, Jeremy Corbyn, then just a boring, offside Labour MP, joined with London Mayor Ken Livingstone (recently suspended from the Labur Party for his dalliance...

Hmmm. The Times (I think) ran a big cartoon feature portraying the bomber(s) as coward(s). Politicians still fall back on the same accusation. They may be psychopaths, mentally disturbed, losers, very stupid and ignorant, sadists, but they are not cowards.
They kill themselves. They believe they will go to paradise. This is what their religion teaches. If you die in killing the enemies of Allah you are blessed with heavenly rewards for eternity.
There is something wrong with their religion. We need to spell that out!

Does the reaction to the Manchester bombing show a change from the usual claptrap? Terry Glavin thinks so: At the time of the London bombings, Jeremy Corbyn, then just a boring, offside Labour MP, joined with London Mayor Ken Livingstone (recently suspended from the Labur Party for his dalliance...

He should be at liberty to say all those things. The red line as you suggest is a call to violence.
But there is another aspect to it. What about “a right of reply”? Should there be a right of reply? How do we get the opportunity to tell him what we think and where he is wrong? Yes, attitudes such as his might be exactly what helped motivate the Manchester bomber.
And, who recruited him, who employs him, what do his colleagues think? Are they of the same mind? Where does he come from? Why is he living in Denmark?

Any strategy to counter the radicalisation of young Muslims is, at some point, going to have to get serious about policing social media sites - YouTube, Facebook, etc. - and cracking down on extremist preachers. The problem is, where do you draw the line? Take Mundhir Abdallah, for instance - an...

“A shallow fetishisation of ‘togetherness’ takes the place of any articulation of what we should be together for – and against.”
I’m all in favour of spelling out what we are against, but, of course, if that was done it would starkly demonstrate the failure of our politicians over the last several few decades to deal with certain versions of Islam. The last thing they will do is admit to that.
I recommended it in another comment, but I’ll recommend it again, if I may. One of the Amazon reviewers of Baroness Warsi’s “The Enemy Within: A Tale of Muslim Britain” paraphrased her chapter concerning British Foreign Policy as follows:
“British foreign policy is the reason young Muslims turn to terrorism. We must not give in to this type of blackmail. [So far, so good!]. We must pursue the foreign policy we believe is right. Our foreign policy is wrong. The human rights and values (democracy etc.) we demand British citizens including British Muslims subscribe to at home should be the basis of our foreign policy yet we are friends with dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia, and Egypt and odd cases like Pakistan who deny these rights and ignore these values. This hypocrisy is what infuriates young British Muslims. We have to change our foreign policy and stop working with or supporting these countries until they subscribe to human rights and British values.”

Can't really argue with Brendan O'Neill here: After the terror, the platitudes. And the hashtags. And the candlelit vigils. And they always have the same message: ‘Be unified. Feel love. Don’t give in to hate.’ The banalities roll off the national tongue. Vapidity abounds. A shallow fetishisatio...

Islamic reform is a real mish-mash. If you enjoy banging your head against a brick wall you can try reading some examples of modern Islamic thinking such as ““Woman’s Identity and Rethinking the Hadith” by Nimat Hafez Barazangi of Cornell University. Or try Baroness Warsi’s proposals in her “The Enemy Within: A Tale of Muslim Britain”, only slightly less painful!
The greater advance will be for Muslims to understand the shaky foundations of their religion and to recognise its man-made character. I know it will take a very long time for such understanding to become widespread but it is the only real solution. It has taken Christianity more than 100 years to go through a similar process. Modern media may speed up the process for Islam. We need a lot more (and better) programmes like Holland’s effort on Channel 4.

The latest from Jesus and Mo: Which leads neatly into last night's Tom Holland documentary, ISIS: The Origins of Violence. I thought it was powerful and well-made. The contentious part was at the end. Holland explained the particular ISIS obsession with France as, in part, payback for Napoleon...

".... whereas before the nineteenth century the Prophet was viewed as a mystical leader, afterwards he came to be seen more as a kind of early, oriental, version of Napoleon or Alexander - a military figure. Well, Holland knows more about the early history of Islam than I do, but that did surprise me".
You shouldn't be surprised. For all his knowledge Holland sometimes expresses outrageously incorrect opinions. It's difficult to judge whether it's some kind of tactic to win over certain readers, or he really believes what he says.

The latest from Jesus and Mo: Which leads neatly into last night's Tom Holland documentary, ISIS: The Origins of Violence. I thought it was powerful and well-made. The contentious part was at the end. Holland explained the particular ISIS obsession with France as, in part, payback for Napoleon...

It’s incredible. The cost of the equipment (hire, whatever), knowing how to use it, the time and space it must take. And what about dealing with the building owners! Do they get a say in it!
That’s before the painting starts. Getting everything right, perspective, dimensions, in those huge spaces while working a few feet (?) from the surface shows amazing skill.

Are there people still obtuse enough to maintain the absurd fiction that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam? If there are, here's Tom Holland - reviewing Graeme Wood's The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State - to set them straight: The venue for the declaration of the “Islamic...

If you study the comments and the votes on the comments on any article in the Guardian to do with Islam, you will see they are overwhelmingly critical of Islam or whatever argument is being pushed to explain some objectionable Islamic belief or behaviour.
And, judging by the quality (spelling, grammar, punctuation) and the length of comments they really are Guardian readers, and not trolls from the Daily Mail or the BNP.
It is a remarkable publishing phenomenon. On the subject of Islam the Guardian is totally out of step with its readers.
There is a survey of it which you can see here: https://islamsurveyed.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/readersdontmatter-attheguardian.pdf
The irony is the Guardian could do more to help Muslims by being sensibly critical at least some of the time and by supporting Muslim reformers, instead of being so-wilfully one sided, and publishing vomit inducing material such as this latest piece. No wonder comments are OFF.

It's a slippery slope alright. Start reading someone like Sam Harris, who's critical of Islam (and, as it happens, all religions), and before you know it you're a fully-fledged alt-right racist and "Islamophobe". Fortunately a brave soul at the Guardian's CiF has come back from the realm of the ...

The Pope's remarks are a disgrace. If it's any compensation some in his church have a different attitude.
US cardinal says ‘Christian nations’ in West must counter Islamic influx
http://religionnews.com/2016/07/21/us-cardinal-says-christian-nations-in-west-must-counter-islamic-influx/
"Cardinal Raymond Burke, a Rome-based prelate known as an outspoken conservative and critic of Pope Francis’ reformist approach, said in an interview on Wednesday (July 20) that Islam is “fundamentally a form of government.”
While Catholic teaching recognizes that all Abrahamic faiths worship the same God, Burke criticized Catholic leaders who, in an effort to be tolerant, have a tendency “to simply think that Islam is a religion like the Catholic faith or the Jewish faith."

The Pope speaks out: Pope Francis has warned that a recent wave of jihadist attacks in Europe is proof that "the world is at war". Except he doesn't actually talk of "jihadist attacks", because - of course - none of this has anything to do with religion: However, he stressed he did not mean a wa...

I don’t know if this is true but it wouldn't surprise me having been to Nice several times in recent years.
In some quarters you could feel the tension as you walked the streets or used public transport.
“Over One Third of Nice Attack Victims Were Muslim”
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Over-One-Third-of-Nice-Attack-Victims-Were-Muslim-20160719-0034.html?

Liel Leibovitz, in the Tablet, on the new defeatist chic in the wake of Nice: What is to be done about the wave of terror that washes over the world every damn day? If you ask The New Yorker’s George Packer, nothing much: “No revelations come from the massacre in Nice,” Packer wrote shortly afte...

That is an excellent article. Thanks for pointing it out.
By coincidence I’ve just finished re-reading David Fromkin’s “Peace to End All Peace”. It describes how it all went pear shaped 100 years ago.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Peace-End-All-Ottoman-Creation/dp/0805068848?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc
I wonder what Mark Sykes and George Picot would make if it today!
This is an interesting map of how the Ottomans divided the Arab Middle East
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Basra_Vilayet,_Ottoman_Empire_(1900)_v2.png
It clearly shows the “Islamic State”.

A long piece in Mosaic, by Ofir Haivry, on the Sunni Arab implosion: As for the oil-rich Arab countries, for all the profuse revenues gushing into their coffers, they patently failed to create even a single significant industry apart from the petroleum business (itself largely Western-built and ...

Several points:
As I understand it the great majority of Armenians perished through ill-treatment and neglect on their deportation journey. They were being sent somewhere. (Not to gas chambers)
Such forced movement of populations was not uncommon in that part of the world. It happened to Muslims from the Balkans, for example, and to the Circassians who had a role in managing the journey of the Armenians.
I think it is important to make a distinction regarding extermination for racial reasons alone. A big nose is not a threat to anyone as far as I know.
I am in no way a supporter of modern Islamo-facsist Turkey.

One hundred and one years on from the Armenian Genocide: Eleven German MPs of Turkish origin have been put under police protection. They received death threats after supporting a move to describe the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide. Germany's foreign ministry has warned M...

The Turks uprooted the Armenians for military reasons. They posed a threat harbouring Armenian secessionist actively encouraging and supporting the Russian invasion of Eastern Anatolia. Even the peaceful Armenians might have welcomed and aided a Russian invasion, and the prospect of being united with Christian Russia and their fellow Armenians on the Russian side of the border.
No doubt what happened to those uprooted Armenians was a war crime but the Turks did not consciously and deliberately decide to exterminate a population because of its racial character.
Have I missed something?
[*Nearly all my knowledge of this episode comes from Andrew Mango’s “From the Sultan to Ataturk: Turkey”]

One hundred and one years on from the Armenian Genocide: Eleven German MPs of Turkish origin have been put under police protection. They received death threats after supporting a move to describe the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide. Germany's foreign ministry has warned M...

"What I'd like to see is more robust criticism of Islam itself."
Exactly!
I have read the Quran, and find it difficult to understand how any modern, intelligent person can be a Muslim.
It seemed to me about a fifth of the Quran, if not more, is devoted to the threat that anyone who doesn't believe in God, that Muhammad was his messenger, resurrection and the day of judgement, will burn in hell for eternity. And, if they ask for water they will be given molten lead to drink.
You can be as saintly as Mother Teresa but it won't do you any good. What kind of God is that!
And, we have all the questions concerning the true origins of Islam. E.g. Holland, Hoyland, Donner, Spencer, Luxenberg, Luling, Spencer, Puin, Crone, Wansbrough, Nevo, Rippin, Warraq, etc., etc., etc. Some of this material should be compulsory school reading!

No great surprises in today's Sunday Times What do British Muslims really think? (£) poll, though Trevor Phillips is keen to pretend otherwise: I thought this latest exercise would be intriguing. In fact, it has turned out to be astonishing. The data collected by the respected research firm ICM ...

"Chris Allen, from Birmingham University, was the most ingenious of all."
I'm glad he got a mention. His definition of Islamophobia will make everything clear
From his book:
“Islamophobia is an ideology, similar in theory, function and purpose to racism and other similar phenomena, that sustains and perpetuates negatively evaluated meaning about Muslims and Islam in the contemporary setting in similar ways to that which it has historically, although not necessarily as a continuum, subsequently pertaining, influencing and impacting upon social action, interaction, response and so on, shaping and determining understanding, perceptions and attitudes in the social consensus – the shared languages and conceptual maps – that inform and construct thinking about Muslims and Islam as Other. Neither restricted to explicit nor direct relationships of power and domination but instead, and possibly even more importantly, in the less explicit and everyday relationships of power that we contemporarily encounter, identified both in that which is real and that which is clearly not, both of which can be extremely difficult to differentiate between. As a consequence of this, exclusionary practices – practices that disadvantage, prejudice or discriminate against Muslims and Islam in social, economic and political spheres ensue, including the subjection to violence – are in evidence. For such to be Islamophobia however, an acknowledged ‘Muslim’ or ‘Islamic’ element – either explicit or implicit, overtly expressed or covertly hidden, or merely even nuanced through meanings that are ‘theological’, ‘social’, ‘cultural’, ‘racial’ and so on, that at times never even necessarily name or identify ‘Muslims’ or ‘Islam’ – must be present.” (p194)
Now you know!
A review of his book on Islamophobia can be found here: http://islamsurveyed.com/2011/08/14/cant-see-the-trees-for-the-wood-a-review-of-islamophobia-by-dr-chris-allen/

David Aaronovitch (Times £) is invited to address a conference at SOAS on the question of Muslim integration: At one level it was a brave attempt by lay Muslims to get people of different beliefs to debate with Islamic scholars and academics. But, comparing notes with other guest speakers as wel...

Thanks for the link. I've now looked at Wikipedia, a huge amount of info, and over 700 references to more material! I've only been able to spend "minutes" scanning it all (it requires days!)and have not spotted anything really addressing the military questions.
In a bit of Googling I came across this on the Council on Foreign Relations website
http://www.cfr.org/iraq/defeating-isis/p33773
"Intensify air strikes. So far, the U.S. bombing campaign against ISIS has been remarkably restrained, as revealed by a comparison with the strikes against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan after 9/11. When the Taliban lost control of Afghanistan between October 7, 2001, and December 23, 2001—a period of seventy-five days—U.S. aircraft flew 6,500 strike sorties and dropped 17,500 munitions. By contrast, between August 8, 2014, and October 23, 2014—seventy-six days—the United States conducted only 632 airstrikes and dropped only 1,700 munitions in Iraq and Syria. Such episodic and desultory bombing will not stop any determined military force, much less one as fanatical as ISIS."
What is shocking is the "unofficial support" that ISIS gets from various quarters, even Assad. And, possibly the problem is not so much getting rid of ISIS but deciding what to put in its place!

Michael Totten is not impressed with France's "merciless" response to ISIS: After last week’s coordinated string of terrorist attacks in Paris that killed more than 100 and wounded more than 300, ISIS says France will remain on “the top of the list” of targets, that this is just “the first of th...

Is there a short book or article that gives a good explanation of the military strengths and weaknesses of ISIS and its opponents especially the US.
On the face of it a force of 30,000 or so in a small and very open country (it's not like Vietnam) should be an "easy" target for a modern army/airforce . Where do they sleep, eat, how do they move about, how are they supplied?
How does ISIS survive economically? Why can't its sources of finance and food be cut off or significantly curtailed? Why is it still able to export oil? Why are the oil fields still working?
Anyone have any recommended reading/websites?

Michael Totten is not impressed with France's "merciless" response to ISIS: After last week’s coordinated string of terrorist attacks in Paris that killed more than 100 and wounded more than 300, ISIS says France will remain on “the top of the list” of targets, that this is just “the first of th...

Kenan Malik wonders why, with such different approaches to their Muslim populations, Britain and France have still both fostered Islamist terror: In the past, when London was seen as the capital of Islamism and of terror groups – Londonistan, many called it – French politicians and policy-makers...

Regarding that Sykes-Picot agreement it is also interesting to compare the Franco-British divisions with the way the Turks organised things. If you look at old maps of Vilayets (Provinces) of the Ottoman Empire you do find some correspondence. You wonder what the French and British might have done differently. And they took over areas where the foundations and apparatus of self-government had not exactly been encouraged by the Turks.
Even, the notorious straight line from the "e" in Acre to the last "k" in Kirkuk specified by Sykes dividing French influenced areas from British ones makes a lot of sense. It separated a lot of empty space from a lot of empty space.
It makes more sense to blame the Ottomans for all the troubles of the Middle East for the way they ran their empire for hundreds of years and the misuse of 60 years of Arab independence than 25 years of French and British "rule"!
An honest history of the Middle East would be wonderful thing.

Pascal Bruckner is interviewed in The Tablet about his anti-semitic father, his experiences as a soixante-huitard in Paris, and his unfashionable pro-Americanism. This is interesting, I think: Bruckner likes to lash out against politically correct dogmas. In one recent book, The Fanaticism of Ap...

"At the end of the day, you cannot accept other people, who come from a different atmosphere, from a different place"
Good grief! What a shame no leading British politician has the guts and the good sense to say that.
What is wrong with our media?! Why no headlines that these Arabic speaking, Muslim "refugees" are not at all welcome in wealthy Arab/Muslim states, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Gulf States.
This is what should be blasted across the front pages of our newspapers and our TV screens.

Why aren't the oil-rich Gulf States - Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and the UAE - taking Syrian refugees? Michael Stephens at the BBC tries to explain: In 2012 as the war with Bashar al-Assad began to become a more clearly established competition between Sunni Gulf Arab interests an...